prescriptivism

Triple negative

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Some time ago, Language Log discussed a language usage in the web comic Dumbing of Age by David Willis. Since then I have been reading it every day. One recent daily strip has one character saying, in her idiolect, “Ah still don’t ever tell no authority figures nothing”.

Screenshot

(Don’t worry about who these people are and what they’re talking about.)

Proscriptivists proscribe double negatives because, logically, two negatives make a positive. “I didn’t do nothing” means I did something. But no-one ever said it to mean that, and no-one ever seriously understands it to mean that. They don’t prescribe triple negatives, even though, logically, three negatives make a positive. “I didn’t do nothing to nobody” means I did something to nobody.

Language isn’t logic or mathematics. For those people who use double negatives of this kind (of which I am not one), it isn’t negative times negative equals positive, but rather negative plus negative equals negative (which is equally logical and mathematical). Triple negatives don’t attract as much comment because they are so much rarer. Some languages require double negatives. I don’t know whether, in those languages, single negatives are a non-standard option or just plain wrong. 

A few days ago I posted something on Facebook about a recent international event. My wife asked me about it and I said “No-one’s disagreed with me”. I had to explain that this is not the same as saying “Someone’s agreed with me”. 

It’s its or its it’s

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Late last year Language Log had a post about about a movie titled Rebel with a Clause, about a linguaphile named Ellen Jovin who sets up a “grammar table” in public places, at which passerbys ask questions, tell stories and voice their complaints about “grammar”. I use quotations marks because at least some of the questions aren’t about grammar (but are about language). The first pair in the trailer ask about “the proper way to use y’all … does the apostrophe go before or after the a?”. It goes before; it is a contraction of you all and the apostrophe replaces the ou. But this question is about punctuation, which of course intersects with grammar, especially in written language, but we could expunge our written language of all punctuation and still have grammar, and spoken language doesn’t have punctuation at all.

I was surprised that y’all v ya’ll is a question at all, but there are various discussions of it on the internet. Y’all isn’t used much in Australian English, and certainly not by the people I interact with.* Perhaps people are getting misled by ’ll as the contraction of will. Ya’ll = you will???? I don’t think anyone uses that. (Yall have a good time = You all have a good time or You will have a good time????) (*During my first stay in Korea a young American woman colleague came into the staff room, saw a box of donuts and said “Who all’s been to Dunkin’ Donuts?”. I asked whether that was standard ussage for her, and she said yes. Possible answer: “We all (w’all) have been to Dunkin’ Donuts”?)

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I could careless

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In December 2014 (gosh, more than 10 years ago!) I wrote about the word irregardless, noting that it is vanishingly rarely used in real life. A few days ago regular reader/commenter, guided there by a ‘Related posts’ link at the bottom of a more recent post, suggested that a search for ‘couldn’t care less’ and ‘could care less’ might be more productive. 

Google Ngrams shows that could care less is currently used more than 10 times more often than irregardless, and that it is more common in US English than in British (but there is a small blip in 1940s which suggests it was used in British English first).  The results of a general Google search are dominated by people asking whether couldn’t care less or could care less is correct, and other people explaining why could care less is or isn’t correct (there’s no doubt that couldn’t care less is correct and preferable). I’ll stick my neck out to say that it’s not, but that’s not the point of this post. Could care less is illogical (in order to care less, you must currently care some), but that hasn’t stopped, and doesn’t stop, many people. 

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Nazis and nachos

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What do Nazis and nachos have in common?

First there was Egnat, an Etruscan family name of unknown origin and meaning. This was adopted by the Romans, who added the Latin case ending –ius and changed the first letter to I under the influence of ignis, fire, resulting in the name Ignatius, which came to mean fiery, ardent. This became popular among Christians, including Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), whose baptismal name, Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola (as in “Hello, my name is Inigo Loyola, you killed my father, prepare to die”) was one short form of Ignatius. Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus, a missionary and teaching order, in response to the German (and later other countries) reformation. One area of catholic orthodoxy was Bavaria, whose inhabitants were conservative, supposedly simple-minded and often named Ignatz, Ignaz or Nazi. A Bavarian named Nazi was as stereotypical as an Irishman named Paddy. 

Then there was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the NSDAP, whose members were originally largely from Bavaria, and also conservative and supposedly simple-minded. It was convenient for their opponents to refer to them as Nazis, and the name stuck and spread to other countries via German refugees. The Nazis, not surprisingly, hated it and didn’t use it themselves.

Meanwhile, in Spain and Mexico, the name Ignatius was often abbreviated as Nacho. (Other local varieties of the name exist.) One such Nacho was Ignacio Anaya, of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, who in 1943 served “Nacho’s Special” to a group of US military wives from an army base just across the border, and the name stuck.

So, Nazis and nachos are both fiery and ardent. If those names had developed in the opposite countries, we would be enjoying our nazis in a Mexican restaurant and worrying about the rise of neo-Nachos in society and politics. 

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A prescriptivist’s playlist

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I’ve been listening to a lot of pop song compilations recently. With my tongue planted firmly in my cheek:

All shaken up
Another somebody did somebody wrong song
Bobby McGee and I
Doesn’t it make my brown eyes blue?
I can’t get any satisfaction or I can get no satisfaction
I have you, babe or I’ve got you, babe 
Lie, lady, lie
Lo que será, será
Love me tenderly
Mrs Jones and I
There isn’t any mountain high enough or There’s no mountain high enough
Two fewer lonely people in the world
You haven’t seen anything yet or You’ve seen nothing yet

1) One of these definitely doesn’t belong here, because the original is unquestionably correct (or at least is questionable in another way). A free lifetime subscription to this blog to anyone who can point out which.

2) I stuck with titles, being easier to search for. I’m sure there are many more titles and many, many more lyrics. You can search for ‘pop music grammar errors’ to find more examples of ‘errors’, including within song lyrics. Some of these ‘errors’ actually are, but most of the lists fail to take into account that …

3) Informal spoken (or sung) English exists. I can (in some cases only just) accept each of the originals here as common informal spoken (or sung) English. That doesn’t mean that I say or write them, or would accept them without question in an ESL class. I said many times “Many people say X, but ‘correct, exam English’ is Y”.

[PS It’s possible that Two less lonely people in the world is prescriptively correct, too, if it is interpreted as Two + less lonely + people. But it’s hardly romantic to say “Before I met you, I was lonely. Now I am … less lonely.”]

Either way, don’t beg the question

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Some prescriptivists insist that beg the question means, and can only mean, assume the conclusion of a philosophical argument, and doesn’t mean, and cannot mean, raise the question. The esteemed Mark Liberman of Language Log traces the whole history from Greek to Latin to English in probably more detail than you will ever need or want (brief summary: almost everyone now uses it to mean raise the question) and concludes: 

If you use the phrase to mean “raise the question”, some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ “misuse”, you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean “assume the conclusion”, almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use “assume the conclusion” or “raise the question”, depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

The reason I am mentioning this is that a few days ago I was watching a TED-X Talk in which the (native US English) speaker said:

Which begs me to ask another question …

No it doesn’t.

PS 26 Aug: A commenter on a Language Log post seems to have used the phrase in its original sense, judging by his punctuation: “”Is this the best way to approach the problem of the lack of scientific terminology in African languages ?”. I think that this begs the question. Is there any evidence that the lack of scientific terminology in African languages is a problem ?”

“I wish to apologise”

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A document quoted someone’s written submission, which started “I wish to first sincerely apologise for the delay”. Microsoft Word helpfully suggested “Avoiding multiple words between ‘to’ and a verb is best”. At least it didn’t say “Adding any words between ‘to’ and verb is always a no-no”. So far, so good, but its suggested rewriting, “I wish to first apologise for the delay sincerely” is not an improvement. (I first typed “hardly an improvement”, but I’ll be definite here.)

The basic sentence is “I wish to apologise for the delay”, and there are six places the two extra words can go. First(ly), with first (which is more marginal to the sentence anyway):

1 First, I wish to apologise for the delay.
2 I first wish to apologise for the delay.
3 I wish first to apologise for the delay.
4 I wish to first apologise for the delay.
5 I wish to apologise(,) first(,) for the delay.
6 I wish to apologise for the delay first.

(Mentioning then ignoring “I wish to apologise for the first delay”.)

Second(ly), with sincerely:

7 Sincerely, I wish to apologise for the delay.
8 I sincerely wish to apologise for the delay.
9 I wish sincerely to apologise for the delay.
10 I wish to sincerely apologise for the delay.
11 I wish to apologise sincerely for the delay.
12 I wish to apologise for the delay sincerely. 

I won’t discuss these at length, but note that in 8, sincerely clearly modifies wish and in 10 apologise, while 9 is ambiguous, and that some are clearly more formal or informal, or stylish or unstylish. To me, none is completely wrong, but 4, 6 and 12 are the most awkward. (Microsoft’s suggestion is basically 4 + 12.)

There are 42 possible combinations of both words (because when both are in the same slot they can be in either order), which I’m not going to list. You might want to try some out. My choice is “Firstly, I wish to sincerely apologise for the delay”. Fortunately, proscription of the so-called split infinitive is now less common than it used to be. (Even Microsoft Word’s advice doesn’t reach proscription.) The benefit of placing sincerely there is that it is perfectly clear what I am sincerely doing (or doing sincerely).

(I have a vague memory of encountering someone’s thorough analysis of adverb placement, but I don’t think I saved it.)

Extraordinarily unique

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Wikipedia’s article on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan quotes “US officials” describing it as “extraordinarily unique”.

Some style guides advise or prescribe against any modification of unique. Either something is the only one of its kind, or it’s not. It can’t be (for example) very unique. While modifying unique is probably best avoided in formal contexts, there can be no doubt that many people say or write it informally and normally. Google Ngram Viewer shows not (by far the most common), very, as, most, so, quite, rather, somewhat, almost and probably unique. Some of these are (probably) more acceptable, and others less so. 

Extraordinarily unique isn’t on Ngrams’ top 10 results (its usage is about one-tenth that of probably unique), but a general Google search shows about 391,000 results, starting with blind auditions on The Voice, the Atlanta Motor Speedway and the Villa Bismarck on Capri.  


It might just be possible to describe something as extraordinarily unique if it’s extraordinary as well as unique – a whole level more unique than anything else. Australia has many unique animals, but the platypus is extraordinary. Anyone familiar with jerboas will accept the kangaroo, but when the first samples of dead platypuses (?platypi, ??platypodes) arrived in England, the experts there thought someone here was playing a practical joke on them. But “except for its size and exaggerated security measures,” Bin Laden’s compound “itself did not stand out architecturally from others in the neighbourhood.”

Whatever day

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I am convinced that today is Easter Day, but a lot of people think it’s Easter Sunday. This is partly simple familiarity: The Book of Common Prayer, An Australian Prayer Book, A Prayer Book for Australia, the Anglican Communion’s Cycle of Prayer and probably every hymn book I’ve ever used all use Easter Day. It is partly a matter of logic and redundancy. The Day of Resurrection has always been celebrated on ‘the first day of the week’/‘the Lord’s Day’, therefore ‘Sunday’ is redundant. Forty days later comes Ascension Day, not Ascension Thursday. But there’s also Ash Wednesday, Whitsunday and Trinity Sunday, so logic and redundancy only get me so far.

Alas, Google Ngrams shows that Easter Sunday is about three to four times as common as Easter Day. Does this make Easter Sunday ‘right’ and Easter Day ‘wrong’. No. I have the right to choose what I say (I can even say ‘the Day of Resurrection’ if I want to) and everyone else has the right to choose what they say (even if they’re wrong). (Though I doubt that many people ‘choose’ what to say in this case.) I cannot possibly say Easter Sunday and I am even fighting the urge to put it in scare quotes every time I write it.

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Contractions

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The legal writing guide of a mid-level university states “Do not use contractions in your academic writing, Using contractions can give your writing an informal or colloquial tone, which is not appropriate.”  Unfortunately, one of its examples, alongside can’t, shan’t (who writes shan’t anyway?), they’re, wouldn’t and it’s, is o’clock, which is a contraction of of the clock. So don’t use o’clock in your academic writing; use of the clock instead.

That said, contractions are generally avoided in academic writing, but some contractions are now standard. Google Ngram shows that o’clock is about 200 times as common as of the clock. I suspect that no-one actually uses of the clock; they just mention it in the course of talking about the origin of o’clock.

Talking about contractions, the conductor of one of the choirs I sing in told us that the soprano soloist for a recent concert has just had a baby … after 62 hours of labour.